There's a distinction that's probably only obvious to people with some grad-level math: Corner cases are not the same as rare cases. Neither implies the other. "Corners" are a measure-0 subset of a space where open-nbhd/non-singleton methods don't apply Ie "special treatment"
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Replying to @vgr
but there is some kind of relationship here though, right? even if its just semantics/labeling it's something. if a majority of cases of a thing were "corner" cases we would definitely not label that as the corner. corners are always some kind of minority.
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Replying to @danlistensto
Not necessarily, when the majority is corners, we switch language and start talking about how it's a diverse/varied context. Like say the food scene in a cosmopolitan city with lots of food carts.
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Replying to @vgr
I'm not convinced. to me that signals wrong-abstraction.
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Replying to @danlistensto @vgr
for example, in coding, the right abstraction (almost always) results in writing MUCH less code to solve the problem. if I encounter some code where EVERYTHING is being handled as a special case that's a huge code smell. means wrong abstraction.
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Replying to @danlistensto
You assume abstractability is entirely a function of the intelligence of the agent acting on the context. I disagree with that premise. It's fundamentally a propert of the domain. Tax law is less abstractable than classical Newtonian mechanics.
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Replying to @vgr
no way. you've got a really powerful implicit notion of "good abstraction produces good results" here and I think that's wrong. tax law is extremely easily abstractable but you make a value judgment that elegant abstractions of it are bad laws. e.g. flat tax.
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That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about say writing tax software for existing taxes, not legislation. It's got high Kolmogorov complexity. You can't write elegant code for it because it's a bundle of special exemptions and stuff.
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